Cumincad : CUMINCAD Papers : Search Results

CumInCAD is a Cumulative Index about publications in Computer Aided Architectural Design
supported by the sibling associations ACADIA, CAADRIA, eCAADe, SIGraDi, ASCAAD and CAAD futures

PDF papers
References

Hits 1 to 18 of 18

Reformat results as: short short into frame detailed detailed into frame

_id	93a8
authors	Anders, P.
year	1999
title	Envisioning Cyberspace: Designing 3D Electronic Spaces
source	McGraw-Hill, NY
summary	Free of the constraints of physical form and limited only by imagination, new environments spring to life daily in a fantastic realm called cyberspace. The creators of this new virtual world may be programmers, designers, architects, even children. In this invigorating exploration of the juncture between cyberspace and the physical world, architect Peter Anders brings together leading-edge cyberspace art and architecture ... inspiring new techniques and technologies ... unexpected unions of reality and virtuality ... and visions of challenges and opportunities as yet unexplored. More than an invitation to tour fantastic realms and examine powerful tools, this book is a hard-eyed look at cyberspace's impact on physical, cultural, and social reality, and the human-centered principles of its design. This is a book that will set designers and architects thinkingNand a work of importance to anyone fascinated with the fast-closing space between the real and the virtual.
series	other
email
last changed	2003/04/23 15:14

_id	b6d4
authors	Rousse, Pierre
year	1999
title	Envisioning an Urban space that Integrates Architecture into an Information Oriented Society
source	III Congreso Iberoamericano de Grafico Digital [SIGRADI Conference Proceedings] Montevideo (Uruguay) September 29th - October 1st 1999, pp. 197-200
summary	There is an assumption that architecture can provide an evocative vision of an artificial environment using digitalized and wireless communication technology. It is a ideal based on perception of virtual space, where distance is minimized through the continual process of breaking barriers in none visible planes. It is domain of mind, in which the object becomes real by individual choice. It is conceived in a plane known as virtual space or cyber space. Marcos Novak describes it as "space created as habitat for our imagination". I approach the topic trying to establish a connection between the boundaries of virtual space and real space through architecture. These are the objectives of my inquiry: 1) To explore an architectural form in a media of non-concrete space. Space created by a negative space (empty space, residual space, loading space). 2) To define a new technology that marks the beginning of a real virtual environment accessible to everybody. Proposing the idea of socialization through the architecture and revitalizing negative spaces comprehended as valuable public places. 3) Identification and representation of sources that make possible telecommunication technology in an enclosed space. Prototype of a new communicational platform re-interpreted by cyber space, digital images, high-speed data, mobile Internet and application based on Intranets, extranets and mobile multimedia.
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:59

_id	e978
authors	[Zupancic] Strojan, Tadeja Z.
year	1999
title	CyberUniversity
source	Architectural Computing from Turing to 2000 [eCAADe Conference Proceedings / ISBN 0-9523687-5-7] Liverpool (UK) 15-17 September 1999, pp. 196-200
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.ecaade.1999.196
summary	The study of a cyberuniversity derives from an analogy between real urban space and its virtual "substitution". It represents an attempt to balance some views, which seems to be contrary, exclusive, but they are just parts of the same wholeness. Especially the notion of a cyber society is lately considered such an exaggeration, that it is possible to forget the meaning of a real life experience and interactions, which are already threatened. One should contribute to the awarness that is used in such a comparison, it is "just" an analogy, not a real similarity. At the same time it is possible to point out some limitations of a cyberspace and indicate a more realistic view of the meaning of cyber communities. Awarness of the development processes could help to find a balance between reality and virtuality, using cyberfacilities not to destroy us (our identity) but to improve the quality of our (real) life.
keywords	University, Cyberuniversity, Space, Cyberspace
series	eCAADe
type	normal paper
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:54

_id	e78e
authors	Anders, Peter
year	1999
title	Anthropic Cyberspace: Defining Eletronic Space from First Principles
source	III Congreso Iberoamericano de Grafico Digital [SIGRADI Conference Proceedings] Montevideo (Uruguay) September 29th - October 1st 1999, pp. 56-62
summary	This paper proposes principles for the design of human-centered, anthropic cyberspaces. Starting with a brief examination of our cognitive use of space, it suggests that we address cyberspace as an extension of our mental space. The paper procedes with twelve concepts based on scientific and cultural observations with respect to individual cognition and social interaction. These concepts are general - not specific to any culture or technology in the accompanying arguments the author expands on these concepts illustrating them with examples taken from conventional and electronic media, space and cyberspace the author hopes with these conjectures to begin a discussion on the anthropology of space and its emulation.
keywords	Cognition, Cyberspace, Design, Internet, Simulation, Space
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:47

_id	becb
authors	Anders, Peter
year	1999
title	Electronic Extension: Some implications of cyberspace for the practice of architecture
source	Media and Design Process [ACADIA ‘99 / ISBN 1-880250-08-X] Salt Lake City 29-31 October 1999, pp. 276-289
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.acadia.1999.276
summary	This white-paper builds upon previous research to present hybrids of electronic and physical spaces as extensions of current design practice. It poses an hypothetical project - a hybrid of physical and cyberspaces - to be developed through an extrapolation of current architectural practice by fully exploiting new information technologies. The hybrid's attributes not only affect the scope of development but the very activities of the design team and client during - and after - deployment. The entire life cycle of the project is affected by its dual material and media presence. The paper concludes by discussing the effect the hybrid - here called a "cybrid" - on the occupant, and its local and global communities. It reviews the economics, administration, marketing, operation, flexibility, and extension of the project to assess its effects on these scales. The conclusions are provisional owing to the youth of the technologies. However, in laying out these issues, the author hopes to begin a discussion on effects computation will have on our built environment.
series	ACADIA
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:54

_id	ga9926
id	ga9926
authors	Antonini, Riccardo
year	1999
title	Let's Improvise Together
source	International Conference on Generative Art
summary	The creators of ‘Let's-Improvise-Together’ adhere to the idea that while there is a multitude of online games now available in cyberspace, it appears that relatively few are focused on providing a positive, friendly and productive experience for the user. Producing this kind of experience is one the goals of our Amusement Project.To this end, the creation of ‘Let's Improvise Together’ has been guided by dedication to the importance of three themes:* the importance of cooperation,* the importance of creativity, and* the importance of emotion.Description of the GameThe avatar arrives in a certain area where there are many sound-blocks/objects. Or he may add sound "property" to existing ones. He can add new objects at will. Each object may represents a different sound, they do not have to though. The avatar walks around and chooses which objects he likes. Makes copies of these and add sounds or change the sounds on existing ones, then with all of the sound-blocks combined make his personalized "instrument". Now any player can make sounds on the instrument by approaching or bumping into a sound-block. The way that the avatar makes sounds on the instrument can vary. At the end of the improvising session, the ‘composition’ will be saved on the instrument site, along with the personalized instrument. In this way, each user of the Amusement Center will leave behind him a unique instrumental creation, that others who visit the Center later will be able to play on and listen to. The fully creative experience of making a new instrument can be obtained connecting to Active Worlds world ‘Amuse’ and ‘Amuse2’.Animated colorful sounding objects can be assembled by the user in the Virtual Environment as a sort of sounding instrument. We refrain here deliberately from using the word musical instrument, because the level of control we have on the sound in terms of rythm and melody, among other parameters, is very limited. It resembles instead, very closely, to the primitive instruments used by humans in some civilizations or to the experience made by children making sound out of ordinary objects. The dimension of cooperation is of paramount importance in the process of building and using the virtual sounding instrument. The instrument can be built on ones own effort but preferably by a team of cooperating users. The cooperation has as an important corolary: the sharing of the experience. The shared experience finds its permanence in the collective memory of the sounding instruments built. The sounding instrument can be seen also as a virtual sculpture, indeed this sculpture is a multimedial one. The objects have properties that ranges from video animation to sound to virtual physical properties like solidity. The role of the user representation in the Virtual World, called avatar, is important because it conveys, among other things, the user’s emotions. It is worth pointing out that the Avatar has no emotions on its own but it simply expresses the emotions of the user behind it. In a way it could be considered a sort of actor performing the script that the user gives it in real-time while playing.The other important element of the integration is related to the memory of the experience left by the user into the Virtual World. The new layout is explored and experienced. The layout is a permanent editable memory. The generative aspects of Let's improvise together are the following.The multi-media virtual sculpture left behind any participating avatar is not the creation of a single author/artist. The outcome of the sinergic interaction of various authors is not deterministic, nor predictable. The authors can indeed use generative algorythm in order to create the texture to be used on the objects. Usually, in our experience, the visitors of the Amuse worlds use shareware programs in order to generate their texture. In most cases the shareware programs are simple fractals generators. In principle, it is possible to generate also the shape of the object in a generative way. Taking into account the usual audience of our world, we expected visitors to use very simple algorythm that could generate shapes as .rwx files. Indeed, noone has attempted to do so insofar. As far as the music is concerned, the availability of shareware programs that allow simple generation of sounds sequences has made possible, for some users, to generate sounds sequences to be put in our world. In conclusion, the Let's improvise section of the Amuse worlds could be open for experimentation on generative art as a very simple entry point platform. We will be very happy to help anybody that for educational purposes would try to use our platform in order to create and exhibit generative forms of art.
series	other
email
more	http://www.generativeart.com/
last changed	2003/08/07 17:25

_id	5716
authors	Cohen Egler, Tamara Tania
year	1999
title	Cyberspace: New Forms of Social Interaction
source	III Congreso Iberoamericano de Grafico Digital [SIGRADI Conference Proceedings] Montevideo (Uruguay) September 29th - October 1st 1999, pp. 253-258
summary	The cyberspace becomes into news forms of communication that transform and expand interaction among men. The objective of our reflection is to understand how space-time relations are changed by the new technologies of communication and information. The starting point of this analysis is the historic dimension of production, interaction and appropriation of space-time processes, proceeding in the se of solving their contemporary forms defined by the growing technology of daily life. It is possible to notice how communication expands the interaction among companies, institutions and society because processes and procedures are publicized, reducing the disorder and uncertain. It is a way of making social complexities more accessible, more clear, being easier read by individuals so they are able to lead with the complex of opportunities and responsibilities that compound the social system. The fundamental constitution of cybernetic spaces is on its capacity of make accessible the processes of communication and information which expand the interaction eliminating intermediaries. The condition of material localization dissolves itself to give place tommunicative interaction. The essential of the question can be stated in the theory that explains that social practices are the result of a cognitive system. That statement send us to the heart of analysis over the importance of comprehending as a moment that precede the action. When societies can be read through a union of knowledge condensed all along their social and cultural development. The development of new technologies of communication and information make nations capable to produce, accumulate diffuse knowledge, conducting to an action of intelligent individuals who write the social development.
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:49

_id	7dcd
authors	Cotton B. and Oliver, R.
year	1999
title	Understanding Hypermedia
source	Phaidon Press Ltd, London
summary	Understanding Hypermedia 2,000 is a wonderful read. It takes you on a journey tracing the origins of hypermedia from its very early beginings way back in the 1700's with the birth of print, all the way through to the modern new media revolution. It charts the developments in technology, culture, science and the arts to give you a very broad understanding of just what hypermedia is and where it came from. Looking to the future, Understanding Hypermedia looks at the components of hypermedia - interface design, typography, text, animation, video, vrml, etc -, the processes of designing and building new media projects - including examples from the web, cdrom and kiosks - and the future of the medium. From the hypermedia innovators to the visionaries of cyberspace. This book is a wonderful, rich and fasinating source of information and inspiration for anyone interested in or working with new media today.
series	other
last changed	2003/04/23 15:14

_id	7546
authors	Coyne, R.
year	1999
title	Technoromanticism - digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real
source	MIT Press
summary	It's no secret that contemporary culture romanticizes digital technologies. In books, articles, and movies about virtual community, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, artificial life, and other wonders of the digital age, breathless anticipation of vast and thrilling changes has become a running theme. But as Richard Coyne makes clear in Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, a dense but rewarding piece of academic criticism, we also get romantic about the new technologies in a more rigorous sense of the word. Whether heralding an electronic return to village communalism or celebrating cyberspace as a realm of pure mind, today's utopian thinking about the digital, Coyne argues, essentially replays the 18th- and 19th-century cultural movement called Romanticism, with its powerful yearnings for transcendence and wholeness. And this apparently is not a good thing. Romanticism, like the more sober Enlightenment rationalism against which it rebelled, has outlived its usefulness as a way of understanding the world, Coyne argues. And so he spends the duration of the book bombarding both the romantic and the rationalist tendencies in cyberculture with every weapon in the arsenal of 20th-century critical theory: poststructuralism, Freudianism, postmodern pragmatism, Heideggerian phenomenology, surrealism--Coyne uses each in turn to whack away at conventional wisdoms about digital tech. Whether the conventional wisdoms remain standing at the end is an open question, but Coyne's tour of the contemporary intellectual landscape is a tour de force, and never before has digital technology's place in that landscape been mapped so thoroughly. --
series	other
email
last changed	2003/04/23 15:14

_id	7ad1
authors	Giordano, Rubén F. and Tosello, María Elena
year	1999
title	Laberinto: Una Biblioteca para la Virtualidad. Reflexiones y Acontecimientos en el Cyberespacio (Labyrinth: A Library for Virtuality. Reflections and Events in Cyberspace)
source	III Congreso Iberoamericano de Grafico Digital [SIGRADI Conference Proceedings] Montevideo (Uruguay) September 29th - October 1st 1999, pp. 83-86
summary	This project investigates in the limits of the word like only means of structuring of the thought, before the appearance of new paradigms: the multimedias and the ciber-space that have transformed so much the language written as the architectural one causing unpublished situations: 1.) The transformation of a concrete container to other virtual. 2.) The transformation of the design object, of one static material to another that is a process. 3.) The transformation in the traditional ways of thinking (reversible as the formal logic of the mathematics) to new imaginarys epistemologicals. // These non alone events have caused changes in the forms of to know and to communicate the reality but rather the same one suffers a dilation process. We present for their exploration, a road synthesized in some hypotheses that were elaborated with reason of the International Competition of ACADIA 1998: 1.) The new communication systems (cibercomunication) they generate a new territory that should be colonized. This territory this conformed by objects related by infinite bonds (hipertext). 2.) The topographical form is not lineal and sequential, this it is multidirectional and multiradial. The phenomenon of the blow-up and the dilation are the mechanisms with those that the new objects are generated. 3.) These related fields generate interstitial empty spaces where it appears the desire. The interstice like existential space.
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:52

_id	b989
authors	Jahn, Gonzalo Vélez
year	1999
title	Realidad Virtual en Arquitectura - Actualidad y Futuro (Virtual Reality in Architecture - The Present and the Future)
source	III Congreso Iberoamericano de Grafico Digital [SIGRADI Conference Proceedings] Montevideo (Uruguay) September 29th - October 1st 1999, pp. 79-82
summary	During recent years, developments in the area of virtual reality and its applications in architecture have undergone a number of important transformations that point out the need of an updated revision and adjustment as regards its current situation status and also that which concerns its potentialities within a foreseeable future. This paper seeks to provide an ample vision about recent developments of VR in architectural applications and, also, about its potential developments within the settings provided by such imminent phenomena as the upcoming Internet II and its future impact on the three dimensional and multisensorial qualities of the information that will move within cyberspace in the next decades. The paper also comments on experiencies underway at the Laboratory of Advanced Techniques in Design, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidad Central de Venezuela in collaboration with the Laboratory of Computer Graphics, School of Computing, also at UCV, Caracas. Finally, a number of considerations and conjectures are dedicated to the new field of VR multi-access worlds and its potential to virtual architectural modeling in the Intenet-WWW.
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 09:53

_id	f799
authors	Lau, Kok Hong and Maher, Mary Lou
year	1999
title	Architectural Design and Virtual Worlds
source	ACADIA Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 4-6
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.acadia.1999.004.2
summary	The combination of architectural design and virtual world design has lead to a rapidly expanding area of study and possibly the birth of a new profession. The potential as well as the uncertainty in the area of virtual architectural design are challenging to anyone who is concerned with our living environment, whether it is physical or virtual. Living in the virtual realm has raised the attention not only of architects, but also philosophers, social scientists and the wider academic and professional community. The discussion and debate on cyberspace will certainly remain an important branch of virtual architecture. In this paper we explore the potential and implications of architectural design in virtual worlds.
series	ACADIA
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:51

_id	5c07
authors	Lee, H.-L., Liu, Y.-T., Chen, S.-C., Tang, S.-K. and Huang, C.-P., Huang, C.-H., Chang, Y.-L., Chang, K.-W. and Chen, K.-Y.
year	2002
title	A Comparative study of protocol analysis for - Spatiality of a Text-based Cyberspace
source	Connecting the Real and the Virtual - design e-ducation [20th eCAADe Conference Proceedings / ISBN 0-9541183-0-8] Warsaw (Poland) 18-20 September 2002, pp. 262-266
doi	https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.ecaade.2002.262
summary	Graduate Institute of Architecture, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 30050, TAIWAN The adaptation of the word cyberspace (Gibson, 1984) following the emergence of the World Wide Web Internet not only succinctly revolutionized the correlation of time and space but also poised to challenge how we view the existing spatial concept. This research tries to use protocol analysis to examine text-based cyberspace, such as bulletin board, chart rooms and so forth, and the objective of this research is to realize the spatiality of cyberspace through the cognitive point of view, and to compare the differences of the definitions and perception ways of spatiality between people with general domain and in design fields. Finally, we validate the existence of cyberspace, where the process not only allows further categorization of spatial elements concluded from the earlier study, but discover that varied backgrounds can affect how a user defines and perceives cyberspace (Strate, 1999).
series	eCAADe
email
last changed	2022/06/07 07:51

_id	ascaad2007_025
id	ascaad2007_025
authors	Speed, C.
year	2007
title	A Social Dimension to Digital Architectural Practice
source	Em‘body’ing Virtual Architecture: The Third International Conference of the Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ASCAAD 2007), 28-30 November 2007, Alexandria, Egypt, pp. 291-304
summary	In 1995 the first in a series of three books were published by Academy Editions, that have since become a vivid handbook that documents how designers responded to the development of architectural drawing applications and the growth of the internet, to establish a form of digital architecture. Offering dramatic images and emotive texts, many of the architects and designers featured in these books deeply affected the perception of digital architecture’s mission by students and elements of the design community. Concentrating upon how to resolve the view that time and space are separate dimensions, and the immersive and dematerial potentials of cyberspace, the developments of this ‘cyberromanticism’ (Coyne 1999) ultimately were not used to sustain digital architectural activity. This paper uses the Academy Editions series to understand how such a vivid aspect of digital architecture failed to fulfil its aspirations. The paper begins by establishing the premise for digital architecture through a link with mainstream architectures interest in the concept of shelter. Through a summary of the practical and theoretical methods outlined by the early designers within the series of publications, the paper demonstrates the critical potential of the field. However a summary of how the proliferation of early imagery fuelled a visual mannerism traces how the third Architects in Cyberspace publication represented a crisis in both identity and practice. The paper then identifies an opportunity for recovering the theoretical imperatives within digital architecture by reflecting upon the emergence of ‘interactive architectures’ use of a ‘social’ dimension that was previously hindered by the use of computer applications in early digital architecture. The paper closes with a reference to two of the authors practical projects that use social data to inform the generation of digital architecture.
series	ASCAAD
email
last changed	2008/01/21 22:00

_id	53a4
authors	Vélez Jahn, Gonzalo
year	1999
title	The MUMOVIAR (Museum for Modeling Virtual Architecture) - A Proposal for a Research Theme (The Mumoviar (For Museum Virtual Modeling Architecture) - to for Proposal to Research Theme)
source	III Congreso Iberoamericano de Grafico Digital [SIGRADI Conference Proceedings] Montevideo (Uruguay) September 29th - October 1st 1999, pp. 379-383
summary	One of the most interesting areas in the forefront of non-immersive virtual reality (VRML) applications to architecture is the one that concerns the design, construction and exploration of on-line multi-access worlds using the Internet-WWW. However, and despite the great proliferation of earlier single-access models built on VRML, attempts to collect, classify and provide accesibility that type of models has proved almost nil. On the other side, one of the architectural typologies that promises the greatest transformation potential in the virtual architecture area in cyberspace is the one that concerns virtual museums and galleries. This paper seeks to provide a bridge between the two aforementioned approaches by formulating a conceptual basis for the creation of a virtual, on-line, multi-access museum intended to house collections of VRML building models. Such models, initially shown at a conventional model scale, would be accessed by visitors through an interface intended to transport those visitors into the models’ environments, where changes in scale could provide navigation access to interior and exterior view of the building . Accordingly, the museum would act as a sort of "spaceport” toward different routes of exploration. This modelistic cascading seems to offer interesting possibilities as regards future virtual architecture applications.
series	SIGRADI
email
last changed	2016/03/10 10:02

_id	7939
authors	Wertheim, M.
year	1999
title	The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet
source	Doubleday, Sydney
summary	Ever since the online world began, its inhabitants have puzzled over a fundamental question: What sort of space, exactly, is cyberspace? Is it just a metaphor, a vivid shorthand for the abstract complexity of computer networks? Or is it in some sense actually a space that parallels the one our bodies live in? Wertheim's impressively argued answer in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet is that it is both, and more. Cyberspace, she claims, at once exposes and fulfills a long-time cultural yearning for the type of immaterial space, the realm of the soul, that was written out of the West's cosmological picture when science displaced medieval theology.
series	other
last changed	2003/04/23 15:14

_id	ca5e
authors	Yamaguchi, Shigeyuki and Toizumi, Kanou
year	1999
title	Computer Suported Face-to-Face Meeting Environment for Architectural Design Collaboration
source	InterSymp-99[International Conference on Systems Research, Infomatics and Cybernetics/ISBN:0-921836-75-9] Baden-Baden(Germany), August2-6, 1999, pp. 39-47
summary	This paper describes our current work in the development of a collaborative design meeting environment which includes hardware and software. It attempts to support the design collaboration in face-to-face meetings, instead of collaboration in Cyberspace. Pinup walls, a meeting table, white boards are metaphors on the proposed system. Digitized design information, CAD drawings, CG pictures or movies and other documents could be accessible to members sitting for testing, simulating, evaluating design ideas or concepts on the projected video screen using installed program modules or off-the-shelf application programs. They could concentrate on discussing design issues, without interruptions caused by looking for some lost information and preparing design models or documents at their desks.
keywords	Collaborative Design, Design Meeting, Face-to-face Meeting, Interface to design information,Room-ware
series	other
email
last changed	2002/09/14 11:26

_id	avocaad_2001_16
id	avocaad_2001_16
authors	Yu-Ying Chang, Yu-Tung Liu, Chien-Hui Wong
year	2001
title	Some Phenomena of Spatial Characteristics of Cyberspace
source	AVOCAAD - ADDED VALUE OF COMPUTER AIDED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN, Nys Koenraad, Provoost Tom, Verbeke Johan, Verleye Johan (Eds.), (2001) Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst - Departement Architectuur Sint-Lucas, Campus Brussel, ISBN 80-76101-05-1
summary	"Space," which has long been an important concept in architecture (Bloomer & Moore, 1977; Mitchell, 1995, 1999), has attracted interest of researchers from various academic disciplines in recent years (Agnew, 1993; Benko & Strohmayer, 1996; Chang, 1999; Foucault, 1982; Gould, 1998). Researchers from disciplines such as anthropology, geography, sociology, philosophy, and linguistics regard it as the basis of the discussion of various theories in social sciences and humanities (Chen, 1999). On the other hand, since the invention of Internet, Internet users have been experiencing a new and magic "world." According to the definitions in traditional architecture theories, "space" is generated whenever people define a finite void by some physical elements (Zevi, 1985). However, although Internet is a virtual, immense, invisible and intangible world, navigating in it, we can still sense the very presence of ourselves and others in a wonderland. This sense could be testified by our naming of Internet as Cyberspace -- an exotic kind of space. Therefore, as people nowadays rely more and more on the Internet in their daily life, and as more and more architectural scholars and designers begin to invest their efforts in the design of virtual places online (e.g., Maher, 1999; Li & Maher, 2000), we cannot help but ask whether there are indeed sensible spaces in Internet. And if yes, these spaces exist in terms of what forms and created by what ways?To join the current interdisciplinary discussion on the issue of space, and to obtain new definition as well as insightful understanding of "space", this study explores the spatial phenomena in Internet. We hope that our findings would ultimately be also useful for contemporary architectural designers and scholars in their designs in the real world.As a preliminary exploration, the main objective of this study is to discover the elements involved in the creation/construction of Internet spaces and to examine the relationship between human participants and Internet spaces. In addition, this study also attempts to investigate whether participants from different academic disciplines define or experience Internet spaces in different ways, and to find what spatial elements of Internet they emphasize the most.In order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the spatial phenomena in Internet and to overcome the subjectivity of the members of the research team, the research design of this study was divided into two stages. At the first stage, we conducted literature review to study existing theories of space (which are based on observations and investigations of the physical world). At the second stage of this study, we recruited 8 Internet regular users to approach this topic from different point of views, and to see whether people with different academic training would define and experience Internet spaces differently.The results of this study reveal that the relationship between human participants and Internet spaces is different from that between human participants and physical spaces. In the physical world, physical elements of space must be established first; it then begins to be regarded as a place after interaction between/among human participants or interaction between human participants and the physical environment. In contrast, in Internet, a sense of place is first created through human interactions (or activities), Internet participants then begin to sense the existence of a space. Therefore, it seems that, among the many spatial elements of Internet we found, "interaction/reciprocity" Ñ either between/among human participants or between human participants and the computer interface Ð seems to be the most crucial element.In addition, another interesting result of this study is that verbal (linguistic) elements could provoke a sense of space in a degree higher than 2D visual representation and no less than 3D visual simulations. Nevertheless, verbal and 3D visual elements seem to work in different ways in terms of cognitive behaviors: Verbal elements provoke visual imagery and other sensory perceptions by "imagining" and then excite personal experiences of space; visual elements, on the other hand, provoke and excite visual experiences of space directly by "mapping".Finally, it was found that participants with different academic training did experience and define space differently. For example, when experiencing and analyzing Internet spaces, architecture designers, the creators of the physical world, emphasize the design of circulation and orientation, while participants with linguistics training focus more on subtle language usage. Visual designers tend to analyze the graphical elements of virtual spaces based on traditional painting theories; industrial designers, on the other hand, tend to treat these spaces as industrial products, emphasizing concept of user-center and the control of the computer interface.The findings of this study seem to add new information to our understanding of virtual space. It would be interesting for future studies to investigate how this information influences architectural designers in their real-world practices in this digital age. In addition, to obtain a fuller picture of Internet space, further research is needed to study the same issue by examining more Internet participants who have no formal linguistics and graphical training.
series	AVOCAAD
email
last changed	2005/09/09 10:48

No more hits.